Newly illustrated with 10 gritty noir pics.

Hollywood private investigator Edmond Clive, fresh from a big job in San Francisco, discovers that theres plenty of trouble for him to investigate on his home turf. First, his best gal, a torch singer at a place on the Strip called the Skyway Club, suspects that someone is watching her, and not just because shes a knockout.

Next, his boyhood best friend, Mick, wants him to figure out who has been sending nasty letters that threaten to rile up the family of rich neurotics into which Mick has recently married.

Since Mick has been leaning on the torch singers shoulder while Clive was away, those two cases merge into a single helter-skelter crisisand thats before the singer gets bludgeoned to death with Micks blackthorn walking stick, even as Clive and Mick both slumber nearby.

Brackett wields these plot pieces to form a dead-on Raymond Chandler pastiche. Even this books finishing twist, a real doozy in its own right, emerges like a half-remembered psycho-sexual nightmare straight out of The Big Sleep. The author also plays exuberantly with every other tic and trope in the Chandler repertoire, and rolls out wisecracking dialogue with high vigor, if not with originality.

Brackett had quite a career. She wrote a slew of science-fiction tales in the 1940s, mostly for hoary but fondly remembered pulp titles like Planet Stories and Startling Stories, and she penned a scattered few crime and mystery novels besides No Good over the course of several decades. But shes best known for her work as a screenwriter, with screenplay credits that rangeimprobably enoughfrom the Bogart and Bacall classic The Big Sleep (1946) to the modern space-opera blockbuster The Empire Strikes Back (1979) which is dedicated to her memory.